


This Mess is a Place

by lullabelle



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Community: whoverse_las, Episode: s01e04 Cyberwoman, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-21
Updated: 2010-09-21
Packaged: 2018-01-07 11:36:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1119363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lullabelle/pseuds/lullabelle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ianto knows what Jack wants of him. Gwen disagrees. Missing scene from Cyberwoman.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Mess is a Place

**Author's Note:**

> Written for whoverse_las Challenge #1, the prompt being "miscommunication."

Ianto Jones is kneeling in gray matter. Brain bits. The part of the human body that is supposed to run the rest (and is most certainly supposed to be kept on the inside), reduced to gunk and globules and left smeared on the concrete floor and clinging to his trousers.

The door behind him opens with a hollow, echoing clunk. "Oi! Cinderella!"

"Don't be a bastard, Owen." Gwen's voice follows, fainter, from farther down the hall.

Ianto doesn't answer. He'd only met Annie once before... this. She had seemed very sweet. Young in a way that has always been alien to him. Now her insides are coating his outsides... kneecaps, specifically. It seems inappropriately intimate.

Outsides are all Ianto has anymore. It's all he's made of now. There is a cavern in him, and maybe Lisa's won, because now he's just like her, a soulless empty thing. A sob erupts from him without warning. There's scuffling behind him as Gwen shoves her way past Owen. Her hand lands lightly on his shoulder, and he doesn't even have the presence of mind to flinch away.

"Come upstairs, Ianto."

He doesn't answer right away. It takes him a moment to rediscover his mouth. "Can't. I need to clean this up."

Gwen's quiet and maybe she's staring at him with wide-eyed compassion, and maybe she's frowning with her eyebrows and it's making her nose wrinkle. Ianto will never know because he can't tear his eyes away from the pulp fiction horrorfest splayed across the floor in front of him.

"When Jack said to clean this up, he wasn't talking to you," she says with conviction.

"Who the hell else was he talking to?" Ianto snarls. "You wouldn't know a mop if it bit you."

Owen snorts, though he's no better; actually, he's a fair bit worse, but Ianto has no desire to pick a fight right now and really, he has no idea where his outburst came from.

Gwen's hand disappears, ostensibly to thumb at her earpiece as she says, "Jack, please tell Ianto he's not responsible for cleaning up down here." A long pause, followed by an unhappy, "But _Jack_..."

Ianto is in need in of a mop. He will fetch it when he rediscovers his feet. 

It's going to be a minute.


End file.
